HyperTransport Over Ethernet - A Scalable, Commodity Standard for Resource Sharing in the Data Center

Abstract

Future data center configurations are driven by total cost of ownership (TCO) for specific performance capabilities. Low-latency interconnects are central to performance, while the use of commodity interconnects is central to cost. This paper reports on an effort to combine a very high-performance, commodity interconnect (HyperTransport) with a high-volume interconnect (Ethernet). Previous approaches to extending HyperTransport (HT) over a cluster used custom FPGA cards [5] and proprietary extensions to coherence schemes [22], but these solutions mainly have been adopted for use in research-oriented clusters. The new HyperShare strategy from the HyperTransport Consortium proposes several new ways to create low-cost, commodity clusters that can support scalable high performance computing in either clusters or in the data center.